Abstract
Commodities elicit desire and commodities contain history that spans temporalities and geographies. A scholarly reflection on consumption is, thus, embedded in global labour and production chains, the creation of habits, consumer cultures and its consequent relationship with our everyday lives and the nation. The edited volume is a detailed and an expansive study of how commodities and consumer cultures played a significant role in the crafting of nationalist imaginations and what constituted a distinct Indian modernity. A running theme through the essays is who/what constitutes the modern consumer and who can participate in this discourse.
Commodity consumption and consumer culture are not an unfamiliar terrain in South Asian studies. The liberalization and globalization of the Indian economy in 1991, amongst other things spawned a new range of scholarship that explored the consumption practices vis-à-vis the new middle class. Arjun Appadurai (1988) argued for a sociology of consumption where value was embedded in the exchange of commodities and commodities conferred value to social relations. A sociology of consumption revealed how everyday commodities embodied social status, hierarchies and gender. Expanding on this sociology of consumption, Globalising Everyday Consumption in India shows that commodity consumption emerged in the Indian subcontinent as a powerful source of marking boundaries and the accumulation of symbolic capital much before the state-backed reforms of the early 1990s. This edited volume is a useful addition to the growing body of literature on histories of commodity and consumer cultures, globalization and modernity in India and features established scholars of commodity and material culture, consumption, gender, media and globalization.
This book draws on archival sources and ethnographic methods to illustrate the long-term process of making consumers, starting from the colonial period to the contemporary era of consumer citizenship. The book is temporally divided into three sections: The first four chapters cover the early decades of the twentieth century, the next three chapters discuss post-1947 India, and the last three chapters focus on the present starting with the 1990s. By bringing together historians, social anthropologists and cultural studies scholars, Bhattacharya and Donner are able to assert that everyday consumption is a process circumscribed by the state, the advertising industry and the community localized via public spaces, households, caste, gender and religious affiliations.
Advertising and marketing are at the heart of creating desires and furthering consumer cultures. Advertisements have been used extensively by scholars as sources to trace the evolution of branded commodities (Hussain, 2021). For instance, the marketing of branded soaps and other beauty products hinged on an imperial economy of racial superiority and its further associations with hygiene and cleanliness (Kaur, 2010; McClintock, 1995; Prasad, 2015). The essays by A. Rajagopal and Venkatachalapthy in this edited volume detail the production of formal advertising in colonial India and the gradual development of print technology. Rajagopal argues that advertisements constituted only one part of the consumption process that also included significant logistics like packaging and distribution networks. The advertisements were initially for foreign goods, and thus advertising agencies had to establish their products as modern and enlightened compared with the bazaar merchandise that was declared unsanitary.
Advertisements belong to the idea of a modern society where individuals can act upon their desires and make rational and informed decisions. Furthermore, they act as pedagogical projects initiating new practices. The essays by Douglas Haynes and Abigail McGowan highlight the space of the modern household, where modernity hinges on the material commodities of the house. Drawing and extending on their previous scholarship, Haynes and McGowan (2010) establish the creation of the middle class which is signified via their consumption practices. Haynes’ essay looks at the new electric appliances in colonial Bombay between 1920 and 1940 and the changes it brought about to the households. By focussing on advertisements on electricity and electric appliances like refrigerators and water heaters, Haynes outlines the strategies of advertisers to promote the advantages of an electrified home. This was because of the ambivalence of the middle class towards electric appliances when manual labour was abundant in supply. Haynes argues that the initiation into consuming electricity and other household appliances is a process of becoming modern. Here modernity was reflected via an active role for the woman of the household that was not bound to the drudgeries of manual household chores, better hygiene, well-being and health via the use of refrigerators and light bulbs. In the creation of a desirable and aesthetic home, McGowan moves beyond the orientations of how the homemaker should be as prescribed in the manuals of femininity and domesticity. Instead, she focuses concretely on how the ideal home ought to be for its inhabitants. Through the publications of the Cement Association and the Concrete Association of India between 1920 and 1960, McGowan shows how aspirations are generated by showing the choice of home as an act of consumption and the home as a reflection of the owners’ sensibilities. The advice books on architecture and aesthetics focussed on educating the middle class a modern living and its imagined arrangements.
The edited volume draws our attention to the rich histories of the commodity consumption of the quotidian. Everyday acts of consumption carry within them notions of class, caste and racialized hierarchies. The volume expands on the social histories of commodities like coffee and cigarettes. Bhattacharya’s essay on coffee promotion in twentieth-century India explains how the advertisements for coffee introduced the public to the coffee house as a new space for socialization. Coffee as a beverage of socialization and the coffee house as a public space demonstrate how advertisements of the twentieth century set a cultural narrative that has remained largely unchanged in most parts of India, barring a couple of the Southern states. Kathinka Sinha-Kerkhoff in her essay on cigarette and bidi advertising in colonial India illustrates how tobacco consumption was circumscribed by the Swadeshi movement, which called for a boycott of foreign cigarettes. She argues that the bidi with its forms of indigenous advertising came to be associated with the labouring class and the countryside, whereas cigarettes symbolized a Western lifestyle. Thus, advertising strategies not only create new desires and consumptive practices but, in this case, mirror existing social realities to further entrench these trends and tendencies.
The volume in the latter half focusses on how commodity consumption enables the making of new orientations and identities. Henrike Donner, in continuation to her previous work on gendered middle-class identities and globalization, focuses on the figure of the mother as the centre of reproductive labour and consumerist lifestyles. Donner through her ethnography shows how mothers adopt extensive knowledge of cuisines symbolizing urban cultures to successfully socialize their children to becoming global workers and consumer citizens. However, consumer citizenship in India is an exclusionary category. Writing about the Muslim youth in Delhi, Tabassum Ruhi Khan argues that not all communities are included in the imagination of the modern consumers. Structural stereotypes of the Muslim lifeworld prevent the youth from fully engaging with the apparent status-enhancing effects of consumer cultures. Khan’s essay, rooted in the structural exclusion of religious minorities, provides an alternate perspective to the presumed effects of consumerism, which is lodged in identity building and novel forms of reconfiguring society and space. The point about consumer citizenship with its processes of accumulation enhancing exclusion and marginalization of large sections of the population is highlighted in Sohini Kar’s ethnography of microcredit schemes that target poor women. Kar argues that the poor are not aspirational consumers. Rather, the liberalization of the economy has produced new consumers of credit and pushed women into cycles of debt with an over-reliance on traditional kinship networks.
Whilst the volume’s essays on advertising and consumption as a source of aspiration and new desires are by now a rather familiar terrain in research on commodity and material culture and globalization in South Asia, the category of consumer citizenship explored via ethnographic research is the most novel component of the entire volume. Consumer citizenship disrupts the familiar narrative of consumption as a source of autonomy and self-fashioning. Thus, another essay on the disenfranchising tendencies of consumer citizenship, for instance, in connection with affective labour would have elevated the overall scope of the volume. Nonetheless, this does not take away from the fact that Globalising Everyday Consumption in India is an extremely well-thought and a cogent volume. Its strength lies in its sound methodology of integrating historical sources with qualitative research. It most definitely is set to act as the first stop for new and seasoned readers to gain a holistic perspective on the multiple processes that govern consumption patterns in India.